Friendship

There are many types of friendship.  There are friendships that commenced from time immemorial, from childhood, which seem to persist despite the unremitting passage of time,  There's always that link although they would sometimes be tenuous that you'd wonder if any link exists at all.  I remember my friends in the tenements somewhere in Manila.  They were real childhood friends.  I was grafted into that little society when I wasn't even half a year old.  Many friendships were bonded there, forged in the playtime in the neighbourhood.  There were street games like patintero which is like a block and chase game which never was my favourite but it did pass the time.  There were card games using comic trading cards which we called Teks.  Maybe that word was derived from Text for the cards almost invariably had text bubbles in them.  Every now and then we'd play hunting using our slingshots to strike down little birds.  Somehow we had the damaged bird cut up and defeathered and roasted over some makeshift oven using paper, dried grass, and twigss for fuel.  We also needed some rice and we, little kids, would hang around the rice store and manage to steal a handful of rice which would then be boiled in a tin can.  Then the party begins although the bird itself for its size would never really be enough.  It was just some adventure shared among friends. 

As we hit the teenage years, I said goodbye to my friends, because we had to move to a place farther away.  Eventually my friends found themselves living in the USA or Canada.  Those friends are gone but not quite because there are ways to get in touch, mostly by email.  I would receive birthday greetings and I would send mine.  Some photos may be shared.  So there still is a link, tenuous though may be.

Then of course there's social media, a platform I have not yet employed to connect to the childhood friends.  I have actually for a considerable time ensconced myself in a bubble in FB, connecting only to my children and their children. The time perhaps has come to open up to this world of possibilities despite social media inanities.  As we grow old I suppose it is good to be like children again.  Didn't Jesus even say that being a child is our ticket to heaven (Mt 18:3)?